1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer software. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for storing and sharing images such as photographs via a communications network and for permitting the identification of objects and the location of the objects within the images. The invention enables users to supply and/or receive information about the existence of objects within images.
Portions of this patent document contain material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyrights whatsoever.
2. Background
Digital photography allows people to quickly and easily take, print, and/or share photos without film and the associated film developing costs. The popularity of digital photography has increased dramatically due to the increased availability of digital cameras and the widespread acceptance of the Internet. Many Internet users have created websites that organize their digital photographs into online photo albums that can be accessed by other Internet users. These web pages permit a large number of people to view the photos and allow the author to both add and remove photos from an album.
Although creating web pages for online photo albums offer advantages over traditional photo albums, their creation requires programming expertise such as skill in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Many people do not have the technical knowledge and/or time to build their own online photo albums. Sharing of photos from online photo albums is also problematic and requires that each photo be manually sent, e-mailed, or downloaded. If the recipient wishes to use the photos in their own web pages, each photo must be then uploaded to an additional site. These steps are time consuming, duplicative, and also require programming knowledge.
To address these problems, several websites that specialize in online photo albums have been created. These websites allow users without programming skills to quickly and easily create and maintain online photo albums. Users are only required to upload photos that they wish to add to an online photo album. The sites, through programming on the webserver, or “server-side scripting”, then create all necessary HTML programming to add the uploaded photos to the users' photo albums. Many of these sites also offer image enhancement capabilities (e.g. sharpen, brighten, reduce “red-eye”, etc.), as well as photo printing and developing functions. Photo-specific sites have also eased the process of sharing photos by providing a means for users to quickly and easily e-mail links to photos or photos themselves to one another and, in some cases, contribute photos directly to other's photo albums.
While websites that specialize in the creation of online photo albums offer many advantages, they suffer from several limitations. For example, existing websites do not offer users the ability to identify objects within photos. If a user is viewing a photo and does not know certain individuals in the picture, the user is unable to use current systems to determine their identities. Typically, photo album sites offer the ability to describe uploaded photos through the use of captions or other descriptive fields. These fields may be used to describe or name individuals within the photo. For example, a user may upload a photo and give it a caption of “Stephanie rollerblading with Tauny”. This caption alone is not sufficient information to ensure the viewer can correctly determine the identities of the individuals within the photo, because to do so would require prior knowledge of which person is “Stephanie” and which is “Tauny”. A viewer who does not know these individuals may have difficulty or be unable to correctly identify the individuals within the photo. Furthermore, less descriptive captions such as “The Family at the beach” would offer little help unless the viewer knows each individual in the photo. Thus, in order to provide sufficient information required to ensure a viewer can identify individuals within a photo, copious descriptions must be input and maintained by users. Typing such captions or descriptions is very time consuming and tedious, especially when a large number of photos are uploaded. Furthermore, when the same person appears in multiple photos, the submitter is still required to retype the identification information into a caption for each photo.
Processes have been developed to identify individuals within photos. For example, one process requires people to wear badges containing identification information such as unique color codings when their photos are taken. When a computer processes a photo containing a badge, the computer can access a database to determine which badge was assigned to which person and then identifies the person as existing in this photo. This process has many drawbacks including the dependence on physical badges. If the badges cannot be seen in the photos, the people wearing the badges cannot be identified. Moreover, this process is not functional for the vast majority of photographs: any photos that were taken outside of this tightly controlled environment.
Another problem with photo-specific websites is that they have no search capabilities that permit users to search for photos of specific individuals. Users wishing to view all photographs that contain a particular person must manually access all possible photo albums to find the desired photos. For example, if a user wishes to find all pictures of a particular friend, the user may have to browse through several of his/her own albums where that friend may appear (e.g. “High School pictures”, “Reunion Weekend”, etc.), as well as access and browse through each of the friend's albums, or any third-party's albums where the friend may appear. With a reasonable number of photos, this becomes time-prohibiting if not impossible. Search features could be designed to search aforementioned descriptive fields (e.g. a caption), however, as there is no naming standard, people are described differently by different people (e.g. first name, last name, full name, nickname, etc.) and many names would be used to describe multiple people (e.g. Mom, Dad, John, etc.). As a result, it would be difficult to have a one to one relationship between descriptions of people and people themselves. Consequently, searches would be unreliable, likely returning many photos of little relevance and failing to return photos that would be of relevance. For example, a search for the term “John Smith” would fail to return photos in which this person was referred to as “John” or, perhaps, “Dad”. However, this same search likely would return photos of other individuals who share the same name “John Smith”.
While reliable database searchability for digital images over the Internet is available, it has not been implemented with photo albums. Particularly, several companies which sell and license images have put catalogs of digital photographs on the Internet. Such websites generally describe images in terms of themes (e.g. sunset, dark or sad) or broad descriptions of objects therein (e.g. beach, farmland, or water), without identifying the objects explicitly. For example, a picture of a man and woman on the beach at sunset, which could be licensed to a beach resort for print or web use, could be identified as “beach”, “sunset”, and/or “man and woman”. While such descriptive terms can provide a reliable mechanism for searching for images matching the terms, they do not uniquely identify any objects in the images, nor do they have the capability of identifying where these objects appear within the images. For example, a search for the term “clown” is likely to return many pictures of clowns, however, it is very unlikely that every clown pictured would be the same person, just as a search for the term “beach” is unlikely to return pictures of the same beach. Even a search for the term “President” will return several photos of different people. Furthermore, the objects that appear within a photo are not identified as being in a particular area within the photo, they merely are described as being in the photo. For example, websites that return a photograph from a “President” search do not have the capability of identifying that the President is in, perhaps, the lower right corner of the picture. Such technologies have the capability to describe the nature or theme of a photo but not to uniquely identify who or what is in the photo or where in the photo it appears.
Another related limitation of prior art websites is that the captions described above contain static information only, such as names, and do not provide a way to obtain additional information about a person or object such as contact information or to locate additional photos of the person or object.
Another problem with photo-specific websites is that users wishing to share their photos must proactively e-mail or otherwise send their photos to others (i.e., a photo is not automatically shared when a user is described in a photo). For example, even if a user describes a photos as containing “Jane@doe.com” and “John@doe.com”, existing website will not share the photos with these individuals. Through a separate process, the user must still email this photo or otherwise share the photo with, in this case, Jane and John. Although photo-specific websites ease this process, it is still time consuming for users with large photo albums and/or a large number of friends to send their photos to all such persons.